The key was heavy around Felix"s neck and cold on his skin, though its weight and temperature were more to do with what it represented than with what it was. Fear and dread, mainly, a constant nagging reminder that they lived in a world where magic was still possible and was still shaped by it. The contour of every hill, the lie of each forest, every straight or crooked road, the position of towns and villages and their populations: everything was a legacy, and it was going to take time to change.
Even though he was in his own fortress, he felt like he was sneaking around in it. He checked up and down the corridor before fishing inside his shirt for the key on its leather thong. Its shape was crude, and the lock difficult to turn. As he leant into it, he felt the ache in his collar-bone, but he persisted and the lock gave.
He looked again along the corridor, then pushed the door open only just wide enough to ease his slight body through. He pulled the key back out and shouldered the heavy wood shut again.
Three windows pierced the wall high up on the south side of the room, giving little light to the s.p.a.ce below. It was sufficient, though, to make out the long, still shapes of bodies laid out on the cold stone floor, arranged in rows and columns like beads on an abacus.
Some were partially dressed. Mostly, they were entirely naked. Some were without a mark, others had molten burns. Their grave-white forms lay exactly where they"d been placed. None appeared to be breathing. Their hearts were still. Yet their eyelids made an occasional traverse across their wide eyes.
This was magic. They were dead, but alive. It shouldn"t be so, but it was.
There were seventy-two of them. There had been more, of course, but some had been burnt to a cinder in the fire that Mistress Agana had poured down in front of the novices" house, and more had been consumed in Eckhardt"s chambers when she"d burnt them and him. The aftermath of the rebellion had been chaotic, but seventy-two of these ... people remained, sequestered in the fortress, and he didn"t know what to do with them.
They had families, most likely, who had first claim on them. How right would it be to send these still-living corpses back to wives or husbands, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters? There"d been no change in their unlife since Eckhardt had drained them neither was there any prospect of them ever changing.
The door behind him opened again with the same care and quickness that he"d used. It closed, and he could hear her quick breaths and nervousness.
"My lord? Master Thaler said you wanted to see me."
"Yes, Mistress. You seemed the best person to ask about ... about these."
She approached, her footsteps now slow and serious.
"This was Eckhardt"s doing?"
"These are the ones that are left." Felix looked up at the black-cloaked woman. "I don"t know what to do with them."
"I"m not ..." Tuomanen said, then corrected herself. "I wasn"t an expert on necromancy. None of us were. It was an art that was strongly discouraged by the masters. And, by strongly, I mean painfully."
She looked around the room, and at its inmates.
"Mistress, any help you can give." Felix felt their eyes on him. "We"d be very grateful."
"I don"t recognise any of them. Are they all townspeople?"
"I think most of them are. Others are from the surrounding farms and villages."
"Have you considered that just killing them would be a kindness?" She crouched down to inspect a hollow-chested man, his ribs as obvious as they would have been on a skeleton. "What good is there in keeping them like this?"
Felix knelt on the floor next to her, aware of the black tattoos driven into her pale skin, the patterns they made and what they had formerly represented. But she wasn"t like Nikoleta Agana, and he shouldn"t make the mistake of thinking that she was.
"Because there might be some way back."
"From this?" She sucked air between her teeth. "Not now, not without magic. And even then."
"You used to be able to do the impossible. What about all the stories?"
Tuomanen sighed. "My lord, you know why you were told those stories. They were true, yes, but that wasn"t the purpose of them. Our power has always been limited, but it has always been greater than anything the mundane world could do."
"And now it"s not."
The corner of her mouth lifted slightly. "Quite. Although, because the fortunes of Carinthia have been so closely tied to the Order, that"s little cause for celebration."
"My father couldn"t have coped. He didn"t." He reached out his hand and pressed his palm to the breastbone of the skeletal man. He could feel cold, dry skin, like paper. No rhythmic heartbeat. "I have to. I"ve seen what could happen. I saw it at Obernberg, just a taste of it, and I don"t want that to happen to the rest of Carinthia."
"The young are often the most resilient of all," she said. "If the Norns break you, it won"t be because you lack character."
She bent low over the man"s body, and Felix drew back, giving her the s.p.a.ce to work. She pressed and manipulated, but most of all she listened. She lay there, her ear pressed to the skin of the man"s concave stomach, stretched as taught as a drum, moving up to rest on his chest, then his throat and finally against his skull, as if she was trying to read his thoughts.
"There"s nothing," she announced. "Some vestige of the spell Eckhardt used is keeping him alive, and that"s all. This man"s dead. He just doesn"t know it yet."
"There"s no way to bring him back?" asked Felix.
She sat up. "If we still had Eckhardt"s spell book, there might be something in it that I could use. I understand it"s gone, and everything else he owned. In any event, you wouldn"t let me use it, would you?"
"We can"t ..." Felix forced himself to look at the stricken man"s face, at his wet eyes. "We know where that leads."
"The stories you were told were very different to the ones we used to tell ourselves. Armies of reanimated warriors, unkillable and never tiring; creatures made of flesh carved from the fallen and st.i.tched together; skeletons held intact by nothing more than the hexmaster"s will; soul jars; revenants; ancient kings who refuse to die and keep themselves alive by sucking out the lives of their subjects." As she spoke, the temperature seemed to drop, and Felix shivered. "We told such stories to each other in the freezing night while we were still burning from the day"s humiliations and beatings, using them to give ourselves the courage to face the next morning. We knew that one day we"d wield spells of that magnitude, and all our suffering would be worth it."
"We were fools ever to trust you."
Tuomanen bowed her head. "My lord speaks the truth. So, no: there"s nothing I can do for these people, even if I could. Have you tried feeding them?"
"One. Her lungs filled up with the broth we were trying to spoon into her."
"Did she die?"
"No. We emptied her out, and didn"t try again."
"Have you," she said, "have you asked them what they want?"
Felix had. "They never reply," he said, "They can"t move or speak, and I don"t think they can see or hear either. I tried to get them just to blink a yes or no answer, but there was no pattern."
"Perhaps you"re not asking them in the right way." She lifted the man"s hand and hooked her thumb around one of his pale, worm-like fingers. She leant forward, pushing the finger up to an ever more contorted angle.
"Stop."
"My lord, pain is not just a good training aid, it"s also a very great incentive to talk." She kept on pushing. "We don"t even want to get information from him; we just want to know he"s in there."
"Mistress, don"t..."
"It"s in his own best interests. If he"s trapped inside this sh.e.l.l, he needs to find a way of breaking out. Mere discomfort won"t do it." There was a popping sound, and she let go. The finger stuck out and away from the hand, clearly dislocated. "I can keep on until he does something."
Felix swallowed down the acid taste in his mouth. "Put it back," he said. "And don"t do that again."
She shrugged, and gripped the finger hard, pulling it and pressing on the joint at the same time. When she let go, it was back in position. The victim showed nothing, not even a flicker of his eyelids.
"They"re as good as dead. They show no sign of being aware of anything. Nor do they respond to pain. If they are awake in there, then I imagine they"re all completely mad by now." Tuomanen stood swiftly. "They may well be immortal since they don"t seem to be alive, and if that was me, I"d want to be burnt, then my bones ground into powder, just to make sure."
"There"s no hope at all?"
"My lord, forgive me, but you are so very young. Now is as good a time as any to realise that some problems have no good solutions; just ones that are less worse than the alternatives. You need to embrace doubt and fear certainty." She smiled down at him. "I know that must sound strange coming from one of the Order, but there are no givens any more. We"re feeling our way in the dark, and if you hear a voice calling out "this way", distrust it."
"Oh."
"That includes me, for the avoidance of doubt. I"m just as likely to give you bad advice as the next person." She put her hands on her hips and gazed around at the not-dead bodies. "If you lack the stomach for it, I can deal with these poor wretches. I"ll even promise to follow your instructions."
"I"m the Prince of Carinthia. I shouldn"t ask things of those who serve me that I"m not prepared to do myself." Felix gathered his strength and dragged himself upright.
She laughed. It was a pleasant sound, but it had an edge to it. "Who told you that?"
"My father," he said.
"Ah," she said. "It"s a fine ideal, but it wasn"t done in Gerhard"s day any more than it was done in his father"s. The prince"s hands have to be kept clean."
"Do they?"
"They thought so. Don"t feel any compulsion to follow in their hypocrisy. If you get your hands dirty, a few will look down on you for it, but far more will respect you."
"I"ll see to this, then. These unfortunates, whatever else they may be, are still my people." He mirrored her gaze, looking at each and every white-skinned form. It was going to be grim work telling their kin that their family members were still alive, and yet not; that there was nothing that could be done, and that every body needed to be burnt to free them from whatever trap Eckhardt had forced them into. Some would baulk at such an order; and he"d have to make sure it was done.
He"d better start ordering the firewood now.
He glanced at the witch. Former witch. She was studying him.
"As you wish, my lord," she said.
"Are you an elf?" he blurted.
She laughed again, and once more the edge was there, a catch of a blade at the back of her throat.
"Who says I"m an elf?"
"I ..." No, no names. Master Ullmann would be left out of this. "I wondered. You"re from the north, you have a northerner"s name, but you"re dark."
"Inside and out, my lord?"
"I didn"t mean to offend you, Mistress."
She pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes. "Look at you: you haven"t even learnt guile yet. Your statecraft is sadly lacking, Prince Felix, and from what I know of the Jews, with their strange notions of sin and judgement, it"ll stay that way. You have to learn to lie, and lie well, or you"ll lose your life and the palatinate to someone who can."
Felix raised himself to his full, insignificant height and tried again. "Are you ...?"
"Yes," she said. "I"m a changeling."
Ah. "What happened to your human parents?"
"My differences eventually became too obvious to ignore when I turned from being a child to a woman. They wanted me to stay I was their daughter but the rest of the village had other ideas. They chased me out, into the forest, where there were wolves and bears and worse. I was about the age you are now."
Had it always been like this, then? Had the Order been no more than the greatest collection of the most damaged souls in Europe? The greater the hate, the greater the power?
"What did you do?"
"Do? I cried. A lot. I cursed the wind and the trees. I walked south, expecting to be eaten every time I sat down to rest. Eventually, I reached the coast, and found a fisherman. He took me across the Skagerrak, and, on the journey, he told me of what he"d heard about the Order of the White Robe."
"Lucky," said Felix.
"Or not. I could have had a normal life, somewhere, if he hadn"t put the idea in my head that, one day, I might break down the doors of Alfheim and demand my inheritance. So I don"t know whether to find him again to thank him, or to kill him for it." She looked momentarily morose, as if she was remembering her loss for the first time. "And now, wherever the land of the Elves is, I"ll never get there, and even if I did, there"d be nothing there for me."
"I"m sorry. I really shouldn"t have asked." Felix pulled the key out of his shirt, feeling the warmed iron in his grasp. "I hope you decide to stay in Carinthia."
She looked at him differently. Still studying him, but less like a hovering hawk eyeing a rabbit.
"I thought," she said, "you were going to add: because Carinthia needs people like me. Rootless. Stateless. Violent. Expendable. But that"s not right, is it? It seems I need Carinthia more."
She bowed, and Felix didn"t quite know what to make of it all.
"If there are still G.o.ds, may they keep you safe, my prince," she said. "If there are none, and we have to rely on our own hands and courage, then you have mine. If there"s nothing more, then Master Thaler has more book-work for me."
Felix nodded and, when she"d gone, made one last sweep of the room. There was nothing she could do, and nothing he could do.
She was right. Better to send them to the fire than leave them like that forever. And he"d see to the task himself, no matter what his father would or wouldn"t have done.
70.
At times, it was almost pleasant: the land either side of the Salzach was in its full flush of green, and cows were contentedly chewing on the fresh gra.s.s. It was much like home, and he looked at the beasts as a farmer"s son would have done, judging their worth, their meat and milk and hide.
At other times it had been more a farce, as the drifting barge appeared to be inexplicably attracted to the river banks. The prow of the boat would slew across the channel, and as fast as Vulfar"s crew scrambled to steer it away from overhanging trees and stands of closely packed reeds on one side, they"d have to scramble back to use their long poles on the other.
For his part, the bargemaster barked out orders in his barbarian tongue and swung on the tiller as though it were a child"s toy. He"d convinced Mistress Morgenstern to part with a sack of cash, using his honeyed words and Frankish ways, but if she could have seen him now, cursing and swearing, she"d have refused to pay him so much as a penny.
Ullmann sat in the open hold with Horst and Manfred, who seemed enormously amused by the bargees" antics and shouted sarcastic encouragement to them at every opportunity. Ullmann wasn"t the slightest bit amused, though. If Vulfar couldn"t get the barge under control, then the crew would soon be exhausted. A tired man pushing against a pole would make a mistake, slip, fall in, and then there"d be a stupid rush to get him back on board, creating nothing but delay.
The only thing holding him back from leaping to his feet and wresting the captaincy from the Frank was that he knew even less about steering an unpowered barge down a river in spate than Vulfar did.
Bundles of spears weren"t the comfiest perch, either. He gave up and swung himself out onto the barge-boards.
"Hey, Max: going to give the bargemaster a piece of your mind?" Horst grinned up at him.